• Two weeks until polling day, and attention is fixed on a triumvirate of key Senate races: Tennessee, Virginia and Missouri. Victory in two of the three states - all currently too close to call - would give the Democrats a strong chance of winning control of the Senate.

Thomas Schaller isn't sure the Dems can pull it off, though. Writing at In These Times, he argues despite the current polls, the party's core support is still concentrated in the north-eastern states. "Whatever the magnitude of the coming changes, two things are certain," he writes. "The Democrats are going to gain seats in the 2006 midterms, and those gains will come from outside the south."

• With Iraq looming large in voters' minds, it probably wasn't the best time for the president to develop temporary amnesia and claim that his administration's policy "had never been 'stay the course'". ThinkProgress has the interview - and transcripts of Bush's previous "stay the course" soundbites. (Jon Stewart is also well on top of things.)

"Like the Bourbon Kings, this administration forgets everything and forgives nothing," writes Reed Hundt at TMP Cafe. "But his words have this meaning: the White House knows that it is losing in Iraq; or more precisely, the American forces are being squeezed out of Iraq by the escalating civil war. So after the election, changes will be made. But the voters aren't to be told this truth now."

Incidentally, Time's Joe Klein has been on the road with Bush in Virginia, where the president is stumping for George "Macaca" Allen. You know you're having a bad day when even the squash start rebelling:

On the way to the Allen fundraiser, we stopped for a photo op at a picturesque farm stand outside Richmond. There was a pile of pumpkins sitting on a flatbed truck, and both Allen and Bush tried to hoist an aesthetically pleasing pumpkin by the stem. Both stems snapped. "If you break it, you pay for it, Mr President," said Richard Keil of Bloomberg News, echoing Colin Powell's famous rule at the outset of the Iraq war. Bush didn't seem to get the joke. "I suppose you're right," he said, and tried to buy the broken pumpkin.

• The Washington Post reports that Karl Rove is road-testing a new, tougher rhetoric that he hopes will hustle voters back into the GOP fold. "If leading Democrats have their way, our nation will be weaker and the enemies of our nation will be stronger," the Architect told an audience in New York state. "That's a stark fact, and it's the reason that this fall election will turn very heavily on national security."

But at Election Central Greg Sargent isn't convinced. "The implication is always that we haven't yet seen what the GOP's really got up its sleeve, so Dems should be very, very afraid," he sputters. "What Rove said the other night is virtually identical to what he's been saying for literally years now. There's nothing at all new about the "new" lines of attack Rove allegedly "road tested."

Still, the man they call Turd Blossom does have a lot riding on these elections. "If the Republicans hold both houses of Congress (or maybe even one), he'll rise above the smear and nonsense as the man most responsible," writes RCP's Suzanne Fields. "If the Republicans lose both (or maybe even one), he'll be the man with scrambled egg (with cream) on his face."

• And so the midterms spotlight swings to Barack Obama, the Illinois senator and Democratic heart-throb du jour, whose announcement that he's considering a run at the presidency in 2008 was greeted with cheers from liberal commentators. More grudging acknowledgment came from the rightwingers; at GOPUSA, Doug Patton called Barack "the anti-Hillary Hillary", saying that he's "liberal enough to be the most dangerous man in America if he is elected".

Not everyone was convinced that Barack is genuinely considering a presidential run, though. "Behind the energetic spontaneity exists a cautious calculator," guesses Steve Clemmons. "My hunch is that Obama is setting himself up to be Hillary's running mate ... Clinton and Obama would actually be a pretty impressive ticket."

• One to please the paranoid fringe: robo-voting is in the news again, after a Maryland legislator received CDs purported to contain the source code for the state's Diebold e-voting machines. "Regrettably, it is entirely possible that the metadata on the CD-Rom could tell the company the source of the leak. Somebody could get fired," says TalkLeft. "Instead, they should be promoted ... It sounds like Diebold is running a computer shop that can allow an election to be stolen."

Others voiced more measured concerns. "What will happen in November? Are electronic voting machines secure? One need not believe in a vast plot to rig the elections to take those questions seriously - and to be pessimistic about the answers," writes Genevieve Smith in the American Prospect. Wired News agrees, with an unsettling look at the technical problems that plague e-voting gadgets. "The new machines are just as problematic as the old ones," they conclude. "Why can't the computer companies just get it right?"

And dodgy voting machines aren't the only problem voters will have to contend with this November. Mother Jones's list of the worst places to vote in America is a litany of gerrymandering, felon-baiting, phone-jamming and other dirty tricks. Wish you were here?